Monitoring of wind power plants

Long-term temperature measurement and monitoring the ventilation in order to avoid the breakdown of wind turbines

Challenge

A manufacturer of wind power plants is looking for the reason of repeated breakdowns of wind turbines. He assumes that the reason is an overheating of the PCs in the switch cabinet located inside the tower. One possible reason could be that the ventilation system is not activated at the right time. A data logger is to make a long-term measurement of the temperature and record when the ventilation system is switched on and off. The measurement system is to be portable because the long-term measurement is to be made in all towers of the plant. Furthermore, it must be resistant against harsh environment and interferences. To simplify data evaluation, the acquired data is to be imported from the system directly into Excel.

Solution

With three cascadable intelligent MSX-E systems a measurement over weeks can be realised and logged. Therefore two MSX-E3211 are used for capturing the temperature and one MSX-E1516 for registering the switching on and off of the ventilation. For this application, the MSX-E systems are the ideal solution as they are compact and portable systems which can work in stand-alone mode and be easily transported from one tower to the next. The cascadable systems can be synchronised in the µs range and thus provide highly-precise measured values. To resist strains such as current peaks, vibrations, dirt or extreme temperatures from -40°C to +85°C the MSX-E systems are built in robust IP65-compliant metal housings. The software DatabaseConnect which is used with the application allows to import data directly into Excel without programming.